The little things make it a real star

iPhone 6 : The little things make it a real star

Credit: Apple

The larger design is very welcome, but there's much more to the iPhone 6 than a bigger screen

The iPhone 6 is the first major redesign of the Apple iPhone since 2010's iPhone 4. The design is new, with the aluminum side band gone and the glass and aluminum halves directly welded for a sleeker, less-industrial look. The iPhone 6 is also bigger, a long-desired improvement in screen real estate. That's normal change in the smartphone world.

After spending three days with the 4.7-inch iPhone 6, I do love the iPhone 6. While I really like the larger screen — my iPhone 4 was too small — it's the little things that make the bigger iPhone 6 a real star. 

The iPhone 6's hardware is (mostly) excellent

I really like the iPhone 6 as a device.
First, the iPhone 6 is simply a pleasure to hold. The wraparound aluminum is almost velvety, and the glass front melds seamlessly into it. The screen is bright and colorful, without crossing the line into garish as some Android phones do (Galaxy S5, I'm talking to you). There are a few other nice-feeling smartphones, like the HTC One M8, but the iPhone 6 is a cut above.

Under the hood are Apple's new chips: the A8 processor and M8 motion coprocessor, as well as a souped-up graphics subsystem. The iPhone 6 has as much power as some PCs, and you can feel the better performance.

The screen is brilliant and bright, moreso than Apple's previous iPhones, whose images were crisp and true but a bit subdued.


Thank you for the new Middle-Aged view mode. A bigger screen still leaves text hard to read for many middle-aged folks like me.

We want bigger pixels as much as we want more of them, so the iPhone 6 offers what I call Middle-Aged view mode (the real name is Zoomed view, available in the Display & Brightness pane in the Settings app), which makes everything bigger, essentially blowing up the iPhone 5s's screen into the larger physical size of the iPhone 6's screen.

 The graphics subsystem does the scaling, so there's no display lag as I found when Samsung tried a similar capability via software in its unwieldy Galaxy Note Pro 12 tablet earlier this year.


The image below compares the screen sizes; click it to get a full-size version in a new window.

Widgets now can live in the Notification Center. The revamped Notification Center has a separate pane, called Today, for widgets. It shows a summary of the current weather and your day's calendar. To that you can add more widgets; scroll to the bottom of the screen and tap Edit to add or remove them. All apps that have widgets — dozens already do, from Evernote to Dropbox — automatically add those widgets to this screen. A lot of widgets are just quick launchers for their apps, but a few are actually useful, such as those for Yahoo Weather and iTranslate.

The Notification Center's Today screen is where widgets can be added to or removed from.

Keyboards go crazy. Speaking of widgets, iOS 8 also supports extensions, which lets apps interact directly under iOS's supervision. The Box and Dropbox cloud services now have extensions, so app developers can more easily enable direct file access to their services, for example. But the early extensions are mainly alternative keyboards. I don't get the obsession some folks have over custom keyboards, but — what the hey — now you can get them.

 Speaking of keyboards, a change I really dislike in iOS 8 is the new emoji keyboard that's enabled by default.

The key appears near the spacebar, where it's easy to tap by accident. Unless you live in social media, it's more junk to wade through. You can remove it in the Settings app's General pane's Keyboard section. (I did.)

iOS 8 also offers the QuickType feature that suggests words above the keyboard as you type, so you can select the one you mean before typing it out.

It's a feature you'll love or hate, because it can be as distracting as it is helpful. (To disable it, set the Predictive switch to Off in the Keyboards section of the Settings app's General pane.)

 Here's a tip: You can temporarily hide the QuickType bar by dragging it down, then drag it back up when you want it again — rather than disabling it.

DCS-Chairman Derl